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OS4ED/openSIS-Classic
openSIS is a commercial grade, secure, scalable & intuitive Student Information System, School Management Software from OS4ED. Has all functionalities to run single or multiple institutions in one installation. Web based, php code, MySQL database.
openSIS Classic is a PHP/MySQL school information system covering the full K-12 administrative stack: enrollment, scheduling, attendance, gradebook, transcripts, and parent/student portals. It's aimed at schools that need a self-hosted, free alternative to commercial SIS products like PowerSchool or Infinite Campus. Version 9.3 dropped in June 2026, so it's actively maintained.
Feature breadth is genuine — scheduling, gradebook, transcripts, bulk imports, and a parent portal in a single deployable PHP app is a lot of ground covered without a SaaS subscription. Active maintenance with a recent release (9.3, June 2026) means it's not abandonware. Self-hosted on a standard LAMP stack means a school IT department can run it without cloud budget or vendor lock-in. The 276 forks suggest real deployments and community patches circulating.
The architecture is classic early-2000s PHP spaghetti — hundreds of top-level .php files with names like `Ajax.php`, `Warehouse.php`, `ForExport.php` and no visible MVC structure, which means adding features or fixing bugs requires reading each file to understand what it does. The public API surface is three files (SchoolInfo, StaffInfo, StudentEnrollmentInfo) with no visible versioning or auth documentation, so integrating with anything modern is going to be painful. With only 318 stars and most forks likely being school-specific customizations, community-contributed fixes are thin — you're mostly on your own when something breaks. The commercial edition exists alongside this one, which creates tension around what actually lands in the community build versus what gets held back.